Am 02.02.2011 um 09:30 schrieb Hans Hagen:
> On 2-2-2011 8:11, Patrick Gundlach wrote:
>>> If LuaTeX does not open up, there will be a risk of forks. There is already a LuaTeX fork with an xml parser built in. I can understand the reluctance of the LuaTeX team to include unnecessary modules, and it would be helpful if there was a "contrib" directory with third party modules that will be built as a library (.so, .dll) which get installed in the TeXlive system. So one can say for example 'require "harfbuzz"' and have harfbuzz loaded on all platforms LuaTeX is running on.
>> Eh ... luatex is opened up. One can just load libraries.
No. Currently it is impossible to take a LuaTeX binary (from TeXlive for example) and load any non-trivial c-based module. At least for Mac OS X but I guess this is the same on all unix platforms. This makes it impossible to package for example an xml reader lua module into texlive. (See tracker item #555.) But this is - I assume - just a matter of time...
I am _not_ asking for including a whole bunch of libraries into LuaTeX. And I don't expect the already burdened LuaTeX (core) team to do all the work including the libraries. But the community could provide something like tlcontrib or modules.contextgarden.net where we collect luatex'ed libraries that eventually CTAN picks up and include into texlive/texmf/libs/luatex/ (or whatever). Or the mentioned contrib directory in the luatex source, where the optional modules are.
There will of course be complaints such as "my LaTeX document foo.tex does not work together with the library bar.dll in LuaTeX" as we have packages clash in LaTeX today. That's the backside of openness.
> [...] and you cannot expect the luatex team to keep track of them. The only thing we can provide is a stable api into luatex.
I don't expect this and the [stable] API is already there. I don't mind LuaTeX changing its API as long as it is documented somewhere (in the changelogs for example).
Patrick